28 February 2018

Unity in diversity

The Evangelical Alliance’s
Alexandra Davis on
how the One People
Commission is working
towards unity in the
Church.

We have all heard the stories of division
and partisanship in our culture at
present. We hear them in the news, in our
neighbourhoods, even in our churches.
We know the division that exists in our
own hearts - the division between what
we want to do and what we actually do.
The Church in the UK has to ask itself: “Will
we follow society and slip into division? Or
will we seek out the counter-cultural unity
that the family of Christ is called to?”

For the last seven years, the Evangelical
Alliance has been facing the challenge of
racial division head on, through the One
People Commission (OPC). This is a gathering
of leaders from across the different cultural
and ethnic expressions of the evangelical
Church in the UK. It was established in
response to a challenge by key black church
leaders to the Evangelical Alliance council in
2011, that if we are truly committed to racial
and cultural unity in the Church, more effort
needed to be made.

Pastor Chrishanthy Sathiyaraj, leader of a
Sri Lankan church community in Southall
and one of the first church leaders to join
the OPC, shared a vision of the Church at
the Movement Day in October 2017. She
saw it as a series of islands, all with our
different colours, races, cultures, experiences,
expectations, all knowing we need to get to
the mainland, the place of unity. Each of us in
our different expressions of Church are little
islands, doing our bit for God’s kingdom;
but each of us is also trying to reach the
mainland: true unity within all God’s people.

Chrishanthy describes the OPC as a kind
of bridge, helping us reach from our own
islands, giving us a path to tread, a journey
to go on, to reach the mainland and join with
our brothers and sisters in Christian unity.
To this end, we joined together in prayer
last December at the annual OPC gathering.
Brothers and sisters from across the ethnic
expressions of the UK Church gathered to
plan, prepare and pray for more unity in
the Church. Leaders from Latin American,
South Asian, white British, Caribbean, Arabic,
Korean and African church communities
who are rooted in the UK were there as a
demonstration of the unity of the body of
Christ.

The OPC is part of a process of intentionally
growing relationships, choosing to put
aside differences, and humbly committing
to learning from one another in order to
achieve the greater goal of Christian unity.
How are you crossing divisions in your
local faith community? Do you need to
intentionally choose to cross divides? Why
not visit other church gatherings to receive
and be encouraged? How could you start to
have the honest conversations about why
the church is divided and how we might
need to change?

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